Two consulting firms anticipate strong demand for commercial Earth observation products and services in the next decade as satellite constellations offer an increasing array of optical, radar, hyperspectral and video imagery and data.

In recent years, there has been a boom of announcements for satellite constellations comprising satellites weighing as little as 3 kilograms to address a growing market of machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) via satellite.

NASA sees CLPS as a way to achieve low-cost science at the moon, including work identifying resources that could support future human exploration. More importantly, though, it acknowledges that CLPS is a risky endeavor, with many companies likely to suffer technical or financial failures.

The satellite industry has so far managed to avoid a high-profile cyber attack, something experts attribute both to the industry’s vigilance and how oblivious much of the world is to the magnitude of the services it provides.

Spacecraft and debris tracking is a serious problem that is about to get worse as companies prepare to send hundreds or thousands of satellites into megaconstellations, said Paul Graziani, Analytical Graphics Inc. chief executive and co-founder.

The fate of the Trump administration’s Space Force plan is very much up in the air. One takeaway from the results of the midterm elections is that this is likely to be a protracted and contentious fight.

Spacety is one of China’s first commercial and private satellite companies in China, established in January 2016, following new government policies introduced in 2014 and 2015 to deregulate the nation’s space sector.

For decades, space advocates have promoted a vision of space settlement: people living permanently in space, be it on the moon or Mars, or in self-contained space colonies proposed in the 1970s by Gerard K. O’Neill.